John Lancaster
/How did you become a writer? I guess it was in my blood. My father was a reporter and editor at the Wall Street Journal in the 1950s and 1960s. Later he wrote for American Heritage and other magazines, and he also wrote a very fine biography of a 19th century newspaper reporter, Julian Ralph, called Gentleman of the Press. So I grew up steeped in the lore of writing and writers, especially those who worked for newspapers. After college I followed the traditional path of a journeyman reporter, first at the Des Moines Tribune, then at the Atlanta Constitution, and eventually at the Washington Post, where I finished my newspaper career as a foreign correspondent in 2006. I’d gotten a little tired of the genre and wanted to try my hand at longer forms of writing, much like my father had a few decades earlier.
Name your writing influences. Besides my father, two more names come immediately to mind. The first is my high school English teacher, Holly Weeks, who was the first person other than my dad who told me that I could write. The second is Nathaniel Philbrick. I’ve read a lot of great nonfiction over the years, but Philbrick’s Heart of the Sea is the one I keep returning to for inspiration, as much for its structure as for the elegance of its prose. The book is rich with historical context, but it never gets in the way of the riveting narrative at its core. Philbrick knows just when to zoom in and out from the action, and the pacing never flags. I used it as a model for my book on the 1919 transcontinental air race, to the point of keeping a copy on my desk while I wrote. If I got bogged down on one passage or another, I would pick it up and leaf through it for a few minutes, trying to internalize its rhythm. It often did the trick.
When and where do you write? As a newspaper reporter I wrote at all hours, depending on time zones and deadlines, and in all kinds of places, including airplanes and ships, so I’m not too fussy about where and when I write. Now that my life is a bit more settled, I do keep to more of a routine, though it's not especially rigorous. Although I’m an early riser, I tend to waste a couple of hours reading various newspapers—old habits die hard—so I generally don’t sit down at my laptop until about 9 a.m. or so. Usually I write in my home office; if that starts to feel too monastic I’ll head to coffee shop for a change of scene. I try to write for at least three hours, though I’ll often go longer if I’m on a roll. You’ll rarely catch me at the keyboard after 2 p.m. because I’m usually pretty hungry by then. I aim for about 500 words a day, which probably doesn’t sound like much, but the prose that I do produce in one sitting is pretty polished. I know a lot of writers like to slap down a messy first draft without looking back, churning out thousands of words in a single day, but I can’t work that way. It’s probably a holdover from my newspaper days, when I often had to write stories on tight deadlines with no time to revise—you had to get it right the first time. Of course, in writing my book I did have time for revisions, but I made them along the way, rather than after finishing an entire draft. Yes, it slowed me down. But it also meant that the first draft of my manuscript was also my final draft, which was kind of a good feeling when I finally got to the end.
What are you working on now? Polishing the silverware? That’s actually not too far from the truth. I’m pulling at a few threads that I’m not ready to discuss just yet. Failure is an option. Stay tuned.
Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? Not really. The challenge for me is finding the right idea. If I have one that I’m excited about, that is usually enough to break any logjam.
What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? As my dad used to tell me, “There is no one right way to tell a story.” I can’t tell you how often I’ve repeated that to myself while struggling over a newspaper lede, or some other piece of writing.
What’s your advice to new writers? “Follow your interests.” It’s what my dad told me years ago when I was first casting around for book ideas. In hindsight it seems like such an obvious thing to say, but it was just the nudge that I needed. I’d always been fascinated by airplanes—I’d learned to fly just after college—so I started reading books about early aviation. In one of them I came across a brief reference to the transcontinental air race, which led to my first book.
John Lancaster is a veteran journalist who spent twenty years at the Washington Post, including eight years as a foreign correspondent based in Cairo and New Delhi. He left the Post in 2006 to write for magazines, including National Geographic, Smithsonian, Slate, The New Republic, and The Surfer’s Journal. John is also an amateur pilot and longtime aviation buff whose interest in flying led him to the subject of his first book, The Great Air Race. As part of his research for the book, which tells the story of the 1919 transcontinental air race, John piloted a small two-seat plane along the route of the contest, from New York to San Francisco and back again. John grew up in Connecticut and graduated from Stanford University in 1980. He lives on Nantucket and in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Gail Walker, an attorney. They have two adult children.
